4 years of work

Over the last few days we have slowly been putting on the concrete render of the wall by the entrance.  It has taken a while to get this far. First the roof to the water tank was added.  then we built the wall round the edge. and now all it needs is a lick of paint. The photo below shows how it looked 4 years ago and how it is now.

A Step in the right direction

Work still continues on the step extension and the lower patio. we’ve put a few more of the blocks on to bring it up to the level where we can think about putting in the all important first step, but we have now run out of big blocks.

The blocks laid and ready to get in filled both in front and behind.

The whole ramp can now be in filled up to the height.

And with the left over material finished off rendering the inside edge of the roof.

Curves

Finally got the curve finished on the top of the bathroom roof parapet. Following the curve that was drawn on the wooden board at the back it was just a matter of building it up with rocks and cement

Uphill

On the lower patio we have a number of pipes for the grey water irrigation that used to just sit on the surface, but with the changes to the lower patio these are now being placed in large red tubes that need to get buried under the earth as we put it in.

So having put the pipe in we needed to fill in some earth on top to make sure that the path was still useable.

OK looking from the other direction you have to go up over the pipe before you go down the ramp, but hopefully that will get in filled in the next couple of weeks.

The side wall of the ramp which is almost finished now, showing the irrigation pipe coming out through the wall instead of over the top as it used to.

A long time ago we built a small wall on top of the bathroom roof. One part never got finished this was a small curve to blend the top of the wall with the slope down to the existing wall. so with a board screwed to the side of the wall and a few pieces of bar inserted top stop the whole lot sliding down the slope this is already to be cemented next time we make some.

Removal of the Man Trap

The entrance way has always had a large hole in one side of it (it was a drain), but since we ran the drains etc for the new bathroom across it, it has been a bit of a assort course just to get into the house.

So finally we have got around to relaying the entrance way.  This involved digging up the current concrete, creating a manhole for the drain accesses and putting down the new concrete.

Casting Manhole.

Removal of existing concrete.

New concrete laid.

All Done.

So now we can get into the house without braking a leg. I just hope I got the grading right so that the rain water goes down the drain and not into the house.

Rendering the walls

I am not very good at Rendering walls, I never seem to be able to get a good result. Usually the walls are never flat and not very smooth. So as I have to do the 3 external walls of the bath room before the bad weather sets in I thought that I would try something I had noticed in an old book. Using battens attached  to the wall to get an even thickness.

Before the battens were attached we had to chip the old render put up a plastic mesh to help the new render adhere to the wall.

Once the Mesh was up we put up battens and then started the rendering.

I did the first panel in one coat and had some problems with the thickness, too much render in one go. so decided to try the second panel in two coats. (I also did not have enough render made up for the one coat).

The second coat was put on after a coffee brake. and seemed to go on very well. The level was achieved by using a straight edge resting between the battens to take off the excess render, and then using a float with a sponge attached to smooth the surface down.

Once this was done it was left to dry, which was a small mistake as it was then very hard to take the battens out….

But this was fixed with a little render. I think next time I will remove the battens after each panel is done and before it sets. But I am rather pleased with the result. Only two more walls to do…

Let there be Water…

The final connection to the bathroom to be has been done. now there is water in the room. Ok I have not got the fantast idea when the rest of the work will be done but all the services are now in the room.

Also need to make good the hole that is still in front of the front door.

As part of the work we also sealed up the hole in the wall that all the pipes come through.

Top of the wall, mah

It seems to be a week for toping off walls – First we have finished the curved parapet wall at the front of the house. When I say finish, I mean that the wall is built, now I have to get the whole thing rendered. I am not looking forward to that, my plastering is not that good.

The last block on the curved Parapet.

Miracles of Miracles, We have finished the first repair to the terrace wall, its only taken 2 years to do it….. Now we just have to finish the second repair and put some concrete in at the base of the walls so that more does not collapse.

The wall is  finished….

And we have started to reinforce the base of the wall to
stop more coming down.

Drains a GoGo.

Now it is final the time to get the drains to where they need to go, into the bathroom, though it may be sometime before the bathroom is done. Once the connection is there that is one more thing off my todo list.

Its not a hard job just run the three drain pipes across the entrance way and then through half a meter of wall (that Dan was so good to have tunnelled out). You are probably thinking why three pipes, most drains only have one. Well we are looking at water recycling so any waste water from the shower, sink or bath needs to be kept separate from the waste from the loo. The other drain is for rain water and any ground water that gets under the floor in the bathroom.

Instructing Dan on how to do drains (The blind leading the blind)

Finally a connection to the bathroom From the top;
Main drain to the loo, next gray water drain
and finally rain and ground water drain

And here are the drains in the Bathroom to be.

Final bits of the bathroom roof

A year ago we had the roof put on the old water tank so as to use it as the bathroom. To finish the outside off, the roof needs a parapet, some drainage pipes and the walls will then need rendering. I wanted to do this as last year the bathroom walls leaked where the rendering had cracked due to the building work.

The first job is to create the parapet walls. The one by the front door is only 1 block high but the one on the side of the house by the gate is 3 blocks high and has a curved corner by the gate. This wall also curves down the the current low parapet on the old roof.

As well as put the blocks on, drain pipes have to be added so the the water gets off the roof. These had to be cut into the edge of the concrete roof to provide the correct angel.

Blocks laid out for low parapet wall with pipe for drain
after it was cut in to roof concrete.

Blocks in place.

And from the other side

Work on the outside parapet wall.

Work ended for the day, time to clean up.

The magical tunneling seal...

Dan Has arrived for a two week visit, but he says that he is not here for a rest, but to work... GREAT! So we have put him to work tunnelling into the old water tank that will be the bathroom. its over half a meter thick at the base and part rock and concrete.

A happy drilling sealy

So of Sealy went with the new heavy drill and half an hour later the drill started to spark and quit... So he was left with hammer and chisel

Now just left with a hammer and chisel

And it was not that long and he was through.....

We have break through

A hole in the wall .

OK we now have the hole so we have to put the drains in... Oh and we need to get the drill repaired or swapped for a new one...

"YEUCK" a Plague of almost Biblical Proportions.

Things have not gone that well this week. It started well on Monday with a fiesta in Los Sauces so Theresa was off for the day which meant we had a quite day. On Tuesday evening we came home as usual after teaching to find the kitchen window covered, on the inside, with large black flies... I think there must have been around two hundred of them..... Its hard to get flies out of a house when there are fly screens on most windows to stop them coming in! We ended up using the vacuum cleaner to suck them up!
The whole episode sickened my stomach, Once most of the flies were gone I just went to bed and stayed there barricaded into the bed room till almost 3 o'clock the next afternoon. Just coming out to swat any new flies that appeared.
Theresa was so worried about me that she came home lunch time to see how I was doing...
After about 3:00 I finally got up the courage to search for what was the source of the plague. Once I moved a light into what was the old water tank and will be the bathroom I found the SOURCE, the remains of a Rat! Double Yuck! Tabby must have brought it in after killing it and left it there.
We have spent most of the rest of the week cleaning the house, including washing all the crockery etc in the kitchen. The result is that we have a clean house (and the cave of a water tank / bathroom) but nothing else much done, and I have been feeling very off mentally.

With a Little Help From Our Friends

Well to be totally honest "With a lot of help from our friends".

Saturday Sheila and family came over to give me my delayed Christmas Present, it was delayed due to the weather, "One days Hard labor" So we spent the day doing work around the place on things that needed several good bodies to get them done.

Carlos digging for Spain

We (well Sheila and Carlos manly) cleared most of the collapse of part of one of the terrace walls, We had cleaned it up last November but did not have the spare cash for the concrete needed to start fixing it, and due to all the rain another section collapsed. Carlos was great, give him a shovel and ply him with beer (Ops forgot the beer) and he will dig his way to the center of the Earth. By the end of the day most of the fall was cleared and almost ready for the new foundations.

Watching a man at work

Just before lunch Anne and David arrived with their land rover full of Blockes (Breeze blocks), They were kind enough to say that they would pick any building materials up (that they could fit in the van) when they were going past, as Bertha is no more..

After lunch and another session of clearing , Carlos helped to erect the new temporary bathroom roof, (I hope that this time it will not leek, mind you it may not rain that much more now.) All in all it was a very good day.

The new loo roof - some plastic and old water pipes

Carlos helping getting the new roof up.
Image by Sheila

Then this week, we found that, when we returned from teaching in Santa Cruz on Tuesday that Anne and David and been again with another load of Blockes and all the Plastic piping that we need to run the drains under the kitchen floor and for the drainage for the BBQ and patio area.

We are so grateful for our friends, with out them we could not get this place sorted out.

Dodging the Rain

The weather has been so wet this spring that we have not managed to get much done, Most of the jobs on the house are ether outside or need dry conditions.... But we have made some headway in between the showers, with the outside kitchen (BBQ area and patio), Laying Drains and Yearly Vine work.
Outside Kitchen:

All the iron work for the support pliers for the walls have been put in and some of the concrete has been pored and we have even laid some blocks. Work has stalled this week though as we have run out of cement, having a small car means that we can only buy two bags at a time at the moment so can not get in a large stock, and all the shops are shut as its Easter, but maybe tomorrow...

Overview of the BBQ area

We only plain to put the walls up only part way at the moment, and put in the patio so that we can use the area for this Summer and we have limited funds but it will be nice to have somewhere for the BBQ and to sit that is not on a large slope.

Ironwork for piers

Main Drains:

Work has started on running main Drain to the Pozo Negro (Big dark hole in the ground) again, It needs to go under the floor of the kitchen and into the new bathroom. Luckily it looks like the old drain (just a sort of troff that allowed the water from the old kitchen sink to drain to the garden) can be used to lay the pipe most of the way to the bathroom. But this still needs to be excavated as it is full of dirt, the hot and cold pipes to and from the shower, and a lot of other things that I don't want to mention...

Excavation of the old drainage channel

Kitchen:
Not much has been done on here, need to get the drains laid and the flower bed moved as well as water proofing the roof.
Vines:
I have pruned most of the vines, again this has run very late partly due to the wet weather and partly due to the lack of time. This year I have experimented with a very brutal pruning, reducing the number of new branches. At the moment this seems to be doing very well. We will see how things work out later in the year.

One other thing that has slowed things down, is that I seem to not be able to get going, there is so much to do that sometimes I just seem to run round not doing anything just trying to workout what to do. Then when I try to write a list of what to do I just put too much down so that at the end of a week I am so tired that I need to rest for the next week.
One Day I might get it right, I just hope that it is sometime soon....

Work in Progress

Now that we have the cement mixer set up in an easier position. We have been able to get a lot of jobs done around the house, the two main ones are the position for the water tanks behind the old toilet block which also includes the pipe work for the connection of the new bathroom toilet into the existing sewerage system. This has meant digging out an area and building a block wall to hold back the earth from the top level outside the house.



Also we have been working on putting the roof on the roof. What I mean by that is that on the roof we have a small block built cupboard which will house all the equipment for the solar panels. This week we added the top to this, and once the cement has set we will top this off with some traditional Spanish tiles.

Where, oh Where, DOES all the Crap Go?

This is a very important subject on our minds at the moment, OK it may sound crude or something,but it is REALLY important. Why I hear you ask. Well one of the major tasks this year is to convert the old water tank in to a new bathroom. We now have a roof on the tank and a opening into the house, the next job is to start the pluming, and one of the tasks, as part of that is to lay new drains. Now for you who live in the UK and most major towns this is not hard - find the nearest man hole and connect the new drains to that. Well it is not quite that simple here....
We in the country don't have main drains.. So what do we have? We have what is called a Poso Negro, the direct translation of that is "Black Well", and up to last week we did not know where it was and in what condition it was in. We had some idea that it was located close to the current bathroom, (which is a 1m x 2m concrete hut in the garden). We thought that it might be under about half a meter of soil that was dumped in front of the loo to bring the ground up to the level of the house. Well last week I started clearing a space behind the loo to hold the tank for gray water recycling. while doing so I notest that there appeared to be a concrete wall below the loo....
After some work with a hammer, there was a hole and behold we have the Poso Negro, and what is the poso negro? A large hole in the ground, about 1 meter square and 2 meters deep, (well to the serf ice of the water, I am not going to find out how deep that is!!!!), With the loo on top of it.
So now all I have to do is put in the new pipes and close up the hole and we have somewhere for the new loo to empty into.